I think self-hosting email has too many downsides (spam filtering, for example) to be worth it; I’m more concerned about losing my messages (easily solved with POP or mbox exports while still using a cloud account) than government data sharing. Email is unencrypted in transit anyway, and it’s “industry standard” to store it in clear text at each end.

> if your worry is governments reading your mail

complicated. As long as they require a reasonable warrant (ha!), I'm fine. Email is an inherently insecure protocol and ecosystem, anyways.

I haven't used email for communication that I consider to be private for a while - I've moved most, if not all, casual conversation to signal, imessage. Soon, I hope to add something like matrix or mattermost into the mix.

My goal was never to be perfect. My goal is to be able to easily remove myself from an invasive spyware ecosystem, and bring my friends along, with minimal impact.

I have been self-hosting email for 7 years successfully. But it required a physical server in a reputable datacenter, setting up Dovecot, Exim, SpamAssasin, reverse-DNS, SPF, DKIM. It took a bit of time to gain IP reputation but then it has worked flawlessly since. Occasionally some legit mail is flagged as spam or vice versa but it is not worse than any other mail provider. So it can be done! But my first attempts to do that on a VPS failed as IP blocks of VPS providers are often hopelessly blacklisted in major email providers.

there's always protonmail which is supposedly e2e, so they shouldn't be able to scan your mail

unfortunately, self hosting is a pretty clear alternative. Not much else seems to be.